Three Women (19 page)

Elena

Monday morning, Elena lay in bed in the room she finally had to herself again, listening to the sounds from upstairs. That was his tread crossing. Then Marta slogged across the floor. It should be herself up there, not that woman who did not adore him, who did not even know him any longer. Elena had intended to move out and had gone as far as answering ads, before changing her mind. It was too convenient to be living in the same house. She could keep an eye on Marta’s van and know when she had left. It made arrangements pitifully simple.

She would move when he moved with her, not before. They would leave together. Neither of them belonged here. Nobody really loved her except him, and of course Beverly. The first time Elena had seen her after her stroke, she had to turn away from what looked like the Halloween mask of a witch. Now Beverly just looked a little lopsided, like a candle that had begun to soften before it ran down in wax. Beverly could talk, if a person had patience. Elena had patience, unlike her mother, who was really being a bitch, half the time finishing Beverly’s sentences for her. Elena didn’t feel she was so damned important she couldn’t wait for Beverly to say what she wanted to. Grandma was on her side. She had had plenty of affairs, and sometimes told her stories about men she had known over the years. That was more interesting than when she got into talking about old strikes and bygone demonstrations. It took Beverly about three times longer than normal to tell a story, but often it was a pretty good story when she spat it out. Elena truly enjoyed hearing Beverly’s adventures. Too bad those guys were dead and gone or doddering, because some of them sounded cool. Beverly had been way ahead of her time, having a baby by herself without bothering to get married or lie about it; she just wasn’t into marriage and never bothered to marry anybody.

Finally she heard Marta leaving at eight. Now Elena waited for Su
zanne to clear out. She was teaching, and then she would be off to Framingham to talk to the woman who’d fooled around with the kids. At eight-thirty, Sylvia came up the walk and Suzanne met her at the door for last-minute instructions. Then she was gone.

Elena gave herself another ten minutes, in case Suzanne had forgotten something—although Suzanne never forgot anything unless her hard disk crashed. Her mother kept all her little memos about the world on her computer, so she never forgot a birthday or an anniversary or a holiday. Elena surreptitiously checked her mother’s schedule on her computer regularly, so she wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes having a mother who was so well organized had its advantages. There wasn’t a spontaneous moment in Suzanne’s day.

Then Elena put on her bathrobe and passed quietly through the kitchen. Sylvia was helping Beverly shower. Elena ran up the stairway to the second floor. He had left the kitchen door unlocked and was waiting in the kitchen. She let her robe fall. He pulled her into his arms wordlessly, caressing her through the thin cotton of the brief gown. Then he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She fell with a gasp on top of the bedspread and he threw himself on top of her. They were both excited and barely kissed before he thrust into her. He was driving hard. It almost hurt. She liked it. Nothing existed but his weight on her, his hard slender body under her hands, his prick inside her banging and knocking on her womb. She could not stand it. She could not stand for it to end. She could not stand for it to continue. It was too much, too much. When she came, it was as if she’d broken open and molten blood spilled out.

He cried out, almost a scream, when he came. After they had recovered, they lay and talked. She knew much more about him now, about how his father had died of a heart attack when he was way too young, about how his mother had married again to a man he couldn’t stand, and moved to Tucson. She knew he was exactly forty-four—two years younger than Marta. Of course he was younger. She should have known that.

She hated weekends now. Suzanne and Marta had been around all day Saturday and Sunday. At least some Saturdays, the two women went shooting at a range, keeping them out of the house for a couple of hours. When Marta went out Saturday night, Jim had to go with her, to some
judge’s house. They were starved for each other. She had to figure out some way they could meet on weekends. Maybe in the car in the garage? Nothing sounded feasible. She told him he should start having Saturday morning office hours. They had sex at the office sometimes, but it wasn’t comfortable. The damned bowling alley made rumbling noises and booms, and they could hear people talking and the drill going in the dentist’s office next door. She wondered why anyone would go to such a cheap dingy place. It was a low-rent building with paper-thin walls and an odd smell to it, half musty, half chemical. He deserved a better office. She was sure that potential patients took one look, caught the odor, and fled.

“I know it,” he said, “but it’s all I can afford. If Marta would only stake me to a better rental, I know I could get more patients.”

They showered together and then had a leisurely breakfast. “I don’t feel like you’re older than me,” she was saying over her coffee. “I know you are, but it just doesn’t feel that way.”

“I don’t belong to my wife’s generation. I don’t have those baby boomer goals,” he said, eating cereal with sliced peaches. “I think feminists like my wife are actually a couple of generations behind. They’re acting like men did in the fifties. They believe in the corporate dream. They believe in the gray flannel suit. They think happiness lies in achievement.”

“I’m not interested in success,” she said. “I don’t want to be a success, I don’t need to be with a success.”

“You’ve come to the right place.” He laughed shortly, his mouth twisting. He had such a mobile mouth, long, full, and dangerous. When she stared at his lips, she felt herself growing wet again. She could look at his mouth and feel it on her. He was saying, “She’s defending a murderer now, this guy who shot his parents. It’s very Oedipal. No wonder she’s become hard through and through. She’s turning into a suit of armor with no one inside.”

“You think my mother’s that way?”

“I think they’re both so success oriented, they have no inner life. No spiritual values. No sense of their energy or their larger direction. But teaching is different from being a full-time litigator. Suzanne isn’t on the battlefield so much, but she’s used to a level of adoration from her students no man can ever give her.”

“What do you think of her boyfriend?”

“Same type. Ram it through. Get it done. Move on. Search and destroy.”

“They never just sit like this talking.”

“We’re wasting time. That’s what they’d say. I’d say we’re spending it—spending it very well. Actually I don’t like to think of time as something I waste or spend. I think of it as something I experience.”

He took off her nightgown again as they sat on the couch in his study. He put his prick into her but they didn’t fuck. They just sat there joined. He sucked her nipples. “This feels so real,” she said. “I haven’t been this alive since…you know.”

“Say it.”

“I haven’t been so alive since Chad and Evan died.”

“Did they ever fuck you at the same time?”

“No. One did or the other. But once Evan was fucking Chad while he was fucking me. It was awkward. They were way heavy. I didn’t like it.” She had felt smothered, squashed. It was not a good memory and she shook her head.

“Marta has a gun. I’m not a violent man, Elena. I’ve found the gentleness in myself.”

“I hate guns.” She shuddered.

“Poor baby. My baby.” Reaching down, he began to play with her clit.

“I never really understood how my mother justifies shooting for pleasure. It seems like something she’d object to in somebody else.”

“Marta represents battered women and sometimes she gets threatened. But it’s part of her macho image. She says shooting’s her sport.” He was rubbing her harder now. The energy was gathering in her, upwelling. It felt so strong, him inside her and his hand pushing against her hard. She came with a little shriek. He liked her to make noise. He said it was liberating. This time he had her get on her knees on the floor and he entered from behind.

They dressed for work around ten-thirty, since his first client of the day was due at eleven. She drove in first and he arrived five minutes later. At twelve they had lunch down the block in a place that had light California-type food, big gorgeous salads and sandwiches with avocado and lots of sprouts. “You should go back to school and
train as a therapist. It wouldn’t take you long. You have a lot of psych credits.”

“I have a lot of everything credits. Why get another degree?”

“So we can practice together,” he said patiently. “It would be better for both of us. You’d be good at it, I know you would.”

She liked the idea of them both being therapists. It felt like a good way to live. To be together at home and together in the office. They could get off a quick one in between clients. Last Thursday, they’d had sex on his couch. It sagged and hurt her back. When they were both therapists, they’d have a nice big clean office, tastefully furnished with a new couch. “Maybe in the fall. I could go back to school part-time and still work for you.” She didn’t want another woman in her place in the office.

“Unless we throw it all up and run off together…” He grinned.

She wished he would not treat it as a joke. Making a change would be difficult for him, but it was what he needed. He was suffocating in his life, he had said that, and she absolutely agreed. She began to think about California again. Once, years ago with Chad and Evan, she had set out for California. Now she was in love again, once again joined utterly with someone she cared for passionately, someone with whom she formed an intense private world of two. Maybe this time they would really go. In a sense, she was still stuck way back there in the middle of the Nevada desert at dawn, where half of her body and soul had been gunned down to lie bleeding in the gray light. Now perhaps after all these years, she could leave that broken body on the ground and move on toward the West and finally cross the last wall of mountains.

“I want to be with you,” she said, putting her hands on either side of his face and looking into his pale pale eyes. “I want to be with you today and tomorrow and next week and next year.”

“You’re my girl,” he said. “We belong together. We work.”

Nobody else had ever cared so much about her feelings, ever. She could explain how she felt about things, and he’d actually listen and try to help her sort it out, instead of telling her she didn’t really feel that way, or shouldn’t.

When she came home on Wednesday, Suzanne was waiting for her.
Now what? Suzanne got right to the point. She crossed her arms and stood, somehow impressive in spite of the fact that she was five inches shorter than Elena. “Are you having an affair with Jim?”

“No, I’m working for him. What are you talking about?”

“I had to come back during the day. You two were upstairs.”

“Is this your best courtroom cross-examination manner?”

“I take it not answering my question is a yes.”

Elena shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re driving at. We came back here to have lunch and to look at some files of his. He wants me to go back to school to become a therapist. He thinks I’d be good at it. I don’t know. What do you think?” Distract her. Usually the idea of Elena going back to school could excite her mother for up to a week.

Suzanne frowned, silent for several minutes. “Much as I would like to believe you, I’m not sure I can. If you haven’t yet begun an affair with him, don’t. It would be so unfair to Marta. Marta is my best friend. She saved your hide.”

“By lying about me. By making me lie about myself and about Evan.”

“Was it so much a lie? Did you want to go to a youth detention center for three years? Chad was the one who wanted to kill himself. You had no reason.”

“No reason except that my life sucked. Except that you were always trying to make me do what I didn’t want to. You were always trying to turn me into somebody I wasn’t and then making me feel guilty and shitty if I didn’t fulfill your fantasies.” She always had that anger within ready to be loosed, but she was also aware that she had thrown a switch and sent her mother along a track other than the one she had been bearing down on. They could always fight to exacerbated raw nerves over Chad’s and Evan’s deaths.

“Are you really thinking of going back to school?” Suzanne asked.

“Yes. I’d go on working for Jim part-time. He thinks I’d make a good therapist. Wouldn’t you like that better than me working in a restaurant?”

“Of course.” Suzanne was frowning again. “Elena, I’d be absolutely delighted if you returned to school. If therapy appeals to you, I’d be glad to help. But please, please, don’t get involved with my best friend’s
husband. It won’t work out for you. He isn’t about to leave Marta. He’s more dependent on her than you may realize. Everyone will get hurt and nobody will get what they want, Elena, not even you. Especially not you.”

Suzanne

Alexa came to see her with Celeste for backup. They went to lunch, but Suzanne ended up barely picking at her food while she defended herself.

Alexa presided, as she always did. She had tremendous presence for a woman scarcely taller than Suzanne, although solid, stocky. Her shoulders were broad for a woman. “It’s a terrible throwback, Suzanne, to how it was when I was in school. Freud laid down the law that when women reported sexual abuse, it was their fantasies about Daddy. It took ten years of the women’s movement before we had the stuff to prove that sexual abuse of children is shockingly common, not a matter of kiddies making it up out of Oedipal urges.”

“I think inventing abuse in the family is rare, and I believe that multiple abuse in an unbearable situation does lead to repression of memories for years.” Suzanne gave up and put down her fork. She was not going to get any lunch. “But I think the child care cases are a kind of witch-hunting of our time. Mothers and fathers and the larger society feel guilty about someone else’s caretaking. This guilt is turning into persecution.”

“You didn’t think that woman you represented who murdered her husband was making up the stories about him molesting their daughter,” Celeste said. She was looking a little better than she had even a month ago. She had abandoned hope of reconciliation and all her emotion was going into trying to get a good settlement. A little color had come back into her gaunt face. She had touched up her hair to a rich auburn.

“No, I didn’t. I have to look at everything on a case-by-case basis. If
you could meet Maxine, you’d see a woman I don’t think is a liar or an abuser, but a sympathetic caring woman who has been through hell. I’ve read all the transcripts by now, and I think she was railroaded. I’ve seen the videotapes, the unedited videotapes—not those snatches the jury saw—and I think I can prove the manipulation that went on between the psychologists, the DA, and those children. Look, with parents and a strong prosecutor and a team of experts all coaching children, I’m convinced a child will produce testimony about almost anything to please. You have to understand that every child began by denying the abuse and continued to do so until persuaded or coerced into a different story.”

Alexa was biting her lip, her large hands spread on the table in supplication. “You’ve gone over to the side of those associations of men who claim feminists made up all repressed memory and sexual abuse in families.”

“I have not gone over to the other side. I’m handling the appeal of one specific woman royally abused herself by the justice system. Child abuse is so unsavory that even to be accused of it is a crime in itself. No matter if I win her appeal, understand, Maxine will never, never be free of this. She will never be restored to her previous life and her good name, in spite of what I do!”

Suzanne wished she could show her friends the videotapes she had studied. The psychologists told the children that other children had all testified a certain way and what was wrong with them? You could see the children wavering. Some began to weep. Others produced stories on demand, but fantastic ones of flying witches and the torture and dismemberment of squirrels and kittens and bunnies. It was indeed like the trials of the witches, in which neighbors, lovers, friends, and family testified to seeing the accused turn into a big black dog or fly through the air or dance with the devil. As far as she could tell, it was the prosecution that was dancing with the devil in this case. But her friends would never see those videotapes of the sessions with the children.

Suzanne felt alone as she walked back to her office. She could not make Alexa understand, and now Celeste too was estranged from her. She had only half an hour before her next class, and several phone calls to make. She had won Phoebe’s appeal and Phoebe was out of prison and reunited with her daughter—but two years had been lost and their relationship would never be the same. She was trying to help Phoebe
find a job, pulling in favors. Libraries did not seem eager to hire someone who had spent two years in prison, even if she had finally won her case on appeal. Phoebe needed a job and soon.

What was sitting on her mind like a big green bullfrog was her suspicion about Elena. Was Elena having an affair with Jim? She did not want to believe it but neither could she lose that fear. Would Elena, who usually scorned middle-aged men, men who were less than physically perfect (but Jim worked out all the time), really choose someone she had known since childhood for an affair? Her mind was working over Elena’s statement as she would that of any other witness. She was weighing the evidence and the background of the defendant. For Elena, flirtation was a standard way she dealt with men. She probably flirted without even deciding to. Certainly she flirted with Jake whenever she saw him. He just ignored it. “I understand it’s nothing personal,” he said with a grin. Perhaps if Elena did not flirt with Jim, it was more meaningful. All Suzanne could do was watch. Her mind worked over the grounds of appeal for Maxine, Phoebe’s problems, the lecture she was about to give, and her scrutiny of Elena, all separate but all in process.

Justice was her mistress, and sometimes a cruel one, sometimes capricious. The law was an immense skyscraper built out of medieval timbers, the stones of cathedrals, plywood, masking tape, skulls, dried vines, mud bricks, and library paste. It was far from perfect and she did not have the love of the law many of her colleagues claimed to enjoy. She saw its imperfections and its loopholes and its sinkholes. For her, justice wore a female face, a face of mercy as well as of judgment. The rickety edifice of the law had been built by men, for men, and she was a woman forcing her way in and trying to make it proper housing for women and children. Last year someone from the governor’s office had approached her in a preliminary sortie to discover if she had a desire to become a judge in the state system. She had been flattered, tempted, but her answer had been, not yet. She had work to do as a lawyer still.

She had often wished for a wife, and never more than now. Someone to take care of the nurturing, caretaking side of the house, of the lives piled around and against hers. She had never been great at that, and she wasn’t doing much of a job of it now. She had envied Marta having Jim home as much as he was at the office, presumably taking care of things at least minimally. For years he had done their grocery shopping
and took in and picked up dry cleaning and laundry. He had been available for chauffeur service, back when the kids needed to be taken to lessons, practice, events. Jim and Marta had always seemed to Suzanne to have a fine marriage. Why did she think he was fucking around? Because she knew from a colleague that he had an affair with a student just before he was fired by Simmons. She was inclined to believe that if a man had one affair he’d probably had others.

She sat in her office at home that evening quietly toting up arguments on a legal pad. She would observe. There was absolutely no point saying anything to Marta when she had nothing to report except suspicions that she fervently hoped would prove groundless. She could do irreparable damage. She stood up and walked back to Beverly’s room. She had been tempted to ask Sylvia, but she understood at once it was inappropriate. She could not intrude on Sylvia’s personal space with such a question. It was not Sylvia’s business to monitor the sex lives of the household.

Beverly sat as straight as she could in the armchair. Her good hand fluffed her hair. She had not been able to dye it since her stroke, and it was mostly gray, making Beverly look much older than she had last winter.

“Mother, I’m worried about Elena.”

Beverly said nothing. It seemed to Suzanne that she watched more warily. She made no sound, volunteered nothing.

“I’m worried she may be about to get into an affair with Jim. I know that sounds ludicrous, but they’re together a great deal. It would be a disaster.”

Beverly still did not answer. She seemed to be looking past Suzanne out the window to the street.

“Mother, are you listening? I’m scared Elena may be using the house and her job to launch an affair with Jim, Marta’s husband. Do you know about this?”

First Beverly shrugged on one side. Then seeing that would not get her off the hook, she croaked, “Know…nothing. Elena…good girl.”

Suzanne began to wonder if she were suffering from lawyer’s paranoia, that state in which if someone near and dear said that it was raining, you wondered if they were lying. You analyzed their motivations. She seemed to be disbelieving everyone around her. It was ridiculous to
imagine that Beverly was conscious of the world beyond her bed and the narrow circle of things she could reach, that she would be observing anything clandestine. “Never mind, Mother, it’s all right. I’m just being silly.” She felt a slippage of guilt for pestering Beverly. She was becoming a petty tyrant, cross-examining everyone.

Beverly hauled herself to her feet and went thudding around her room, pushing herself along in the walker.

Back in her office, Suzanne pressed her face into her hands. Was she becoming a total cynic, as happened to trial lawyers often enough to make it an occupational hazard? She intensely disliked the idea of mounting surveillance over her daughter, of watching her every interaction with Jim, of monitoring her comings and goings. If Elena realized what she was doing, it would further alienate her daughter. But whatever she did, she would not pester Beverly again with her suspicions: it simply was not fair to her mother.

On Friday, she suggested they all have Shabbat dinner together, something that only happened when she was home enough that day to prepare it. She tried to observe Jim and Elena’s interactions, but there weren’t many to ponder. Jim sat at the big round table in her dining room between Marta and Beverly. Then came Elena. Then herself. Then Jake. Suzanne had decided it was time to include him in family events. Then Marta. She observed no long glances, no meaningful meeting of gazes. They neither avoided each other nor sought each other. She began to wonder if she had been completely mistaken. Everybody ate, drank, and sang, reasonably jolly. Marta seemed in an unusually ebullient mood. Suzanne thought she looked glowing. Marta was a woman who could look incandescently beautiful one day and plain the next. When she was happy, her pink-pale skin lit up from within. Her gray-blond hair was loose tonight on her shoulders.

Elena seemed more contained, eating steadily but not saying much. She was especially solicitous of Beverly. Suzanne was pleased that Elena had gotten over her first reaction to her grandmother and was close to her again, protective. She reminded herself to say something to Elena about appreciating the hours she spent amusing Beverly. When Elena was not occupying herself with Beverly, she was obliquely watching Suzanne and Jake together. If Suzanne was trying to figure out her daughter’s relationship to Jim, her daughter was observing hers with Jake.
There was not a lot to observe, as Suzanne was occupied with the meal, and Jake was being friendly to all. They were not likely to act physical in public. Each was too conscious of position and audience. Yet she was intensely aware of him beside her. It seemed to her his arm below his T-shirt glowed with sexual heat just inches from her own. His sharp foxy face was relaxed tonight. He seemed to be genuinely enjoying the food and the company.

Beverly flirted a little with Jake, but mainly listened to Elena. Elena did seem interested in this job. Several times during the week, Suzanne had heard Beverly laugh with Sylvia, in the evenings with Elena. Beverly did not laugh with her. Her relationship with her mother had not warmed or softened. She knew it was her fault, because she wasn’t around most of the time. She was supporting Beverly financially and physically, but she wasn’t giving much personally. Yet she was always exhausted. Their times together drained her. Perhaps they drained her mother also. She just could not seem to work out a way they could communicate easily, that they could be together smoothly, warmly. When she was apart from Beverly, she could imagine affectionate interaction; but when they were face-to-face, old habits ruled. It was bumpy. She felt as if Beverly was always angry with her.

She would love a real Shabbat—a period of rest, of contemplation—she thought as she stared at the flames atop the beeswax candles dancing in the breeze from the open windows. A scent of roses entered from the garden behind the house, old-fashioned sturdy pink climbing roses that bloomed only in the early summer. A time without tasks, responsibilities, worries. To fix her mind on a rose and sit. She did not know if she had ever experienced that kind of peace and probably never would. She imagined going away someplace with Jake. Then she realized how hard it would be for either of them to snatch that time.

She swore to herself she would put effort into trying to improve her relationship with Beverly but knew the week would go by in a rush of depositions, motions, searching of precedents, teaching and seeing students, faculty meetings, and finishing a law review article she had started months before. She would put Jaime to work on running down the citations and then she would knock the rest of it off…sometime. Sometime this week.

She decided even though she knew nothing, it would not be right to keep her suspicions from Marta, who, after all, was the principal victim if something underhanded was going on. She went upstairs at breakfast time for two days running, but Jim was there both times. It was Thursday before she got some time alone with Marta.

Marta immediately seized her hands, squeezing. “I have news. You’re never going to guess.”

Marta was a partner already, had been for seven years. A better offer? But she was satisfied where she was. She liked a small office and she liked her partners, especially Miles. Something to do with Adam? If Suzanne was wrong, did she have a right to upset Marta? Possibly injure her marriage?

“I went to the gynecologist last week. I haven’t been having my periods….”

“I guess menopause could be considered good news, although it usually isn’t.”

“That’s what I thought. But, Suzanne, you’re not going to believe this any more than I did. I’m pregnant!”